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Google Music for Android improves offline listening with more playlists, playback improvements

There’s good news for Android-owning music fans after Google’s flagship music mobile app — Google Music for Android — got a series of updates that advance its offline listening options.

Now users of the app can stash their Thumbs Up, Last Added and Free and Purchased playlists on the phone, giving them easier access to even more combinations of songs without a Web connection. Google says it has also made other improvements that it says improve offline playback.

The update (v4.4.811H) also allows users to create ‘Instant Mixes’ from their most recently played songs (from the Recent tab), and the app has also added gapless playback support, but the latter is available only on phones that run Jelly Bean Android 4.1 or newer.

Google Music launched almost a year ago to the date with an initial 8 million tracks from artists under a range of top entertainment brands, including EMI, Universal and Sony Music Entertainment. That song library grew to 13 million and the Android app allows users to shop for new tracks through Google Play and add up to 20,000 songs of their own.

Google Music’s off-device and offline credentials are already impressive. User playlists can be shared with friends on Google+, who are able to play tracks in full via the service, while offline playback is a big deal.

No-one likes being tied to the Web to stream music and, by providing access offline, Android Music users can listen to their tunes as if they are stored on an iPod or other personal media players, yet without the local storage demands of thousands of MP3s on their computer.